Since its 2012 premiere at the Bonham Exchange, the annual Rey Lopez Birthday Bash has featured appearances by some of the top performers from RuPaul’s Drag Race. With the reality show’s increasing popularity and its recent jump to VH1, there seems to be no end in sight for these gender-bending, boundary-pushing queens. Before last year’s bash…

Decades before the dawn of RuPaul’s Drag Race, British playwright Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show challenged the status quo and championed a similar message of self-acceptance. Both the Logo reality series and the 1973 musical transcended their early cult status to become icons of pop culture. In 2012, director Greg Hinojosa, then with the…

When RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR) premiered on the Logo network in 2009, no one could have predicted the type of cultural phenomenon it would become, thrusting gay culture into the mainstream, breathing new life into the world of drag and bringing the show’s namesake out of 1990s-era oblivion. Only two years later, local nightclub promoter…